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On March 16 our baby cat, Masuka, went missing. I say baby (even though he’s over a year old) because he’s got a wittttle frame. The little booger found us in Decemeber of 2010, just 2 days before Christmas Eve. He was dumped at our apartment complex at the time. We searched endlessly for its owner to no avail. He was annoying, peed on EVERYTHING, made us mad, etc but we grew to love him unconditionally. He is the sweetest cat. He’s also Nicolas’ buddy during the work day. Since hubster works from home, Suki always needs love and affection. He is our “lap cat” and bursts with personality.

Here he is as baby kitty. He was hardly 4 weeks old! He went with us to both parents’ houses for Christmas. Boy, was that a trip!

The Friday of March 16 we got home around 3 am. He didn’t come in the house so we figured he’d be on the back porch first thing in the morning.

Saturday morning, he wasn’t there. I panicked. We spent the entire day putting up flyers, walking the neighborhood, talking to peeps, posting Craigslist ads, checking animal shelters, etc. He still hasn’t come home. As you can tell, I haven’t given up hope since everything is in the present tense. I know he’s gotta be out there somewhere! We haven’t found him on the side of the road *knock on wood.* However, while searching the internet on different ways to find a lost kitty I came across Petharbor.com.

Pet Harbor has a HUGE database of shelters for virutally any city that puts their inventory online. You can search all kinds of databases. I check them daily, still – call me crazy but I’m a mama bear searching for its cub. Our cats are like our children. We are “those” people. If we had wallets with picture inserts they’d be FULL of our kitties.

But this post isn’t for sympathy or tears (trust me – plenty of those have been shed in the past few weeks). It’s to recommend Pet Harbor’s post card service. They did not pay me or ask me to write about it. I just want other owners who may be searching endlessly on Google or who can’t find their companions to rest assured that these people are LEGIT. My first tipoff that they are legit is their website. SO MANY shelters run their search database through them. That made me think “This probably isn’t a scam.” I’ve gotten LOTS of scam emails the past few weeks recommending certain things for lost animals. Yeah, just delete those. Also, an actual person emailed me a proof within hours of submitting the request. One change needed to be made and that same day, they were shipped.

Originally, when I was looking through Pet Harbor, there was a little ad at the bottom that said “send postcards to neighbors” or something like that. (Don’t be drawn away by the website itself!) I thought “Hmmm… not a bad idea. But how do I get addresses?” There are several services online where you can search within a certain perameter of your house for addresses. Can we say PRICEY!? For 500 address it was like $600+. R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S. This doesn’t even include postage or printing cards. Even for me, the crazy cat lady, this was too much. So I found a list of “carrier routes” provided by USPS. This listed ranges of addresses. I decided to take the bull by the horns and manually create an Excel spreadsheet of addresses. Didn’t take long for me to look back at Pet Harbor – this was going to be tedious and time consuming. Not only would $500 postcards for ME to get printed would cost around $600, but the amount of time it was going to take me to type out all the addresses, get postage (yet another expense), print cards, distribute cards – too much work. I work full time and I am in graduate school. To get all this done would take at least a week. Pet Harbor to the rescue! They print and address 500 postcards for around $400 bucks. Not too bad considering I was about to spend more than that. Call us crazy, but it was worth it. At one point, Nicolas said to me “I’d feel guilty if we didn’t do EVERYTHING we could to get the word out.” Luckily, our emergency fund (thanks Dave Ramsey!) was able to cover the expense. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible. We don’t have that kind of money just lying on our living room floor for use.

I know this probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and some may read this and think “These peeps are loco” but for us, it was worth it for our peace of mind. We still call him to come home. We still talk to neighbors. I’ve gotten several calls from people who received the postcards AND seen flyers – so be sure to do both. I am pretty sure that our neighborhood is on the look out. I am so thankful that there are nice people out there who care about animals. They are family. Now the other two babies have a curfew (mama bear comin’ out again).

So, if your animal is missing, Pet Harbor is the shiz. MUCH cheaper and MUCH less time consuming than doing it yourself. Here’s what our card looked like.

Each day gets easier and harder at the same time. Don’t lose hope though! (At least keep telling yourself that). I imagine he’s with some cute 5 year old who’s lovin’ on him. He really is the sweetest cat. Very vocal and so much fun! Like the hubster said, he brought so much joy to our lives. Maybe God put him in our life for a reason. Whatever it may be or wherever he may be, I hope he’s warm and loved.